178 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



utilities belong. Thoughtful men are predicting a popu- 

 lation of 200,000,000 in 1950 and 400,000,000 at the 

 close of the century. How shall we take care of this 

 vast increase ? 



"A summation of the work of the reclamation serv- 

 ice to January 1 shows that it had dug 1,267 miles of 

 canals, or nearly the distance from Washington to Oma- 

 ha. Some of these canals carry whole rivers, like the 

 Truckee Eiver in Nevada and the North Platte in Wy- 

 oming. The tunnels excavated are forty-seven in num- 

 ber and have an aggregate length of nine and one-half 

 miles. The service has erected ninety-four large struc- 

 tures, including two great dams in Nevada and the 

 Minidoka dam in Idaho, 80 feet high and 650 feet long. 

 It has completed 670 headworks, flumes, etc. It has 

 built 376 miles of wagon road in mountainous country 

 and into heretofore inaccessible regions. It has erected 

 and in operation 1,373 miles of telephones. Its own 

 cement mill has manufactured 70,000 barrels of cement, 

 and the purchased amount is 312,000 barrels. Its own 



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Potato Culture 



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BY L. A. ASPINWALL, JACKSON, MICH. 



THE POTATO. 



Potato (from Spanish patata), solanum tuberosum 

 (name adopted by Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist), is 

 of the nightshade family. It is indigeous to the plateaus 

 adjoining the mountainous range known as the Andes, 

 in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia, also 

 the mountains of Costa llica, Mexico, and the United 

 States as far north as western Colorado. According to 

 Humboldt (the German naturalist), when America was 



Prize-Winning Steers, from Carbondale, Colo. 



saw mills have cut 3,036,000 feet B. M. of lumber, and 

 6,540,000 feet have been purchased. The surveying 

 parties of the service have completed topographic sur- 

 veys covering 10,970 square miles, an area greater tl^an 

 the combined areas of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. 

 The transit lines had a length of 18,900 linear miles, 

 while the level lines run amount to 24,218 miles, or 

 nearly sufficient to go around the earth. 



"The diamond drillings for dam sites and canals 

 amount to 47,515 feet or move than nine miles. Today 

 the service owns and has at work 1,154 horses and mules. 

 It operates nine locomotives, 223 cars and 23 miles of 

 railroad, 39 stationary engines and 27 steam engines. 

 It has constructed and is operating five electric light 

 plants. This work has been carried on with the follow- 

 ing force: Classified service, 380, including the Wash- 

 ington, office ; laborers employed directly by the govern- 

 ment, 3,500; laborers employed by contractors, 6,100, 

 or a total of all forces of 10,000. The expenditures now 

 total about $1,000,000 per month. The excavations of 

 earth and rock amount to 33,000,000 cubic yards, or 

 about one-fourth the estimated yardage of the Panama 

 Canal. As a result of the operations of the reclamation 

 service eight new towns have been constructed and 10,- 

 000 people have taken up their residence in the desert." 



discovered it was cutlivated by the natives in the tem- 

 perate zone from Chile to New Grenada, but not in trop- 

 ical Mexico. 



It was first found by the Spaniards under culti- 

 vation by the natives in the neighborhood of Quito, 

 and probably carried to Spain early in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury. It was introduced into Virginia by the Spanish 

 explorers, and into Great Britain by Sir John Hawkins 

 in 1563 (Garten Zeitung, 1805, page 346). According 

 to Sir Joseph Banks the potatoes brought by Hawkins 

 were of the sweet variety. The credit is generally as- 

 signed to Sir Walter Rawleigh, as herewith given. In 

 1585 or 1586 potatoes were brought from North Caro- 

 lina and Virginia to Ireland by Sir Walter Rawleigh 

 and cultivated on his estate near Cork. Although cul- 

 tivated in Italy and Spain for some years previous to 

 that time, the earliest representation of the plant is to 

 be found in Gerard's Herbal, published in 1597, and in 

 the first edition of Catalogus by the same author, pub- 

 lished in 1596, also in the second edition which was ded- 

 icated to Sir Walter Rawleigh in 1599. In the Herbal 

 we find the first description accompanied by a wood 

 cut (page 781) called the "Potatoes of Virginia." As 

 seen from the above, potatoes have been cultivated in 

 England more than 300 years, though not generally for 

 more than a century, which is also true in our country. 



